Consumer Electronics

It’s getting to be laughable – the phone choices in the Android camp are literally becoming infinite from Samsung alone – let alone when you throw in Google, HTC and others. Apple popularized the mouse, the GUI, fonts, desktop publishing and so many things yet they eventually got killed in the late eighties and nineties because of the competition and their lack of correct response to it.

In other words the price/performance curve got so out of whack that when PCs became commoditized and Apple lost its software ecosystem advantage, it didn’t make financial sense to buy an Apple product.

In 2010 I predicted this would happen to Apple in the smartphone market when I saw the gloriously huge Motorola Droid X. At the time I said the following (bold added for emphasis):

How often do you get to take a piece of expensive electronics and treat it like it’s a bowling ball? The answer for me is not that often but that is exactly what I found myself doing with the InfoSonics verykool RS90 Vortex Smartphone. From the moment I received it, I have pummeled it, drowned it, bowled with it and literally dropped it on every surface I could find.

In many ways Dr. Amar Bose deserves as much credit for revolutionizing audio as Steve Jobs received for revolutionizing numerous industries from movies to smartphones. Bose was one of the first to take high-end audio mainstream – you could find the company’s gear at virtually every audio store in the 1980s when most other stereo equipment was more segmented between high-end and lower quality.

My first encounter with the company was before 1980 where I saw an ad for the company’s direct-reflecting 901 speakers. I was a kid but I decided at the time that I needed to buy these speakers.

Recently a headline stating that most Americans don’t want wearable tech caught my eye and reminded me of many past of articles regarding consumer choices which were just plain wrong. The piece can be summed up with the following paragraph:

The April telephone poll of 1,011 Americans 18 and older found that only 34 percent of those polled who make $100,000 or more a year would consider buying or wearing a consumer-grade smart watch or smart glasses. For those with a significantly smaller income, $35,000 annually, the percentage of those interested in the technology increases to 47 percent.

The implication of the headline is the wearable market will remain a niche and while this could very well be the case, the reality is consumers and analysts have no idea where markets which haven’t been invented yet will be in the future.

At one point in time HP had the best combination of mobile devices anywhere. They owned their own line of PDAs and also purchased Compaq who made the IPAQ – a game-changing device if there ever was one. The thing I liked about the IPAQ versus the Palm 7 which was a competitive device released around the same time was that COMPAQ decided to forego battery life for a bright color screen. In many ways the iPhone 5 reminds me of the first IPAQ device – especially when it prematurely runs out of battery power.

It is no secret that MDM is a huge market and Apple is in large part responsible for the trend where non-Microsoft and non-Blackberry devices infiltrated the enterprise. Moreover, corporate IT departments have huge budgets so if Apple came out with an MDM solution it could do exceedingly well in the market.

Writing for TMCnet, Joe Rizzo asks why Apple isn't in this market and he makes some good points.

You have to wonder however the predicament Cupertino is in at the moment.

The Yealink SIP T-38G Gigabit color LCD PoE IP phone is another impressive IP phone following in the steps of the Yealink T-28P that Tom Keating reviewed in 2010. Tom liked the 4-way arrow navigation keypad, which continues on the T-38G, making navigating on the color screen a breeze. The T-38P also features a very similar web admin page as the T-28P and like Tom I had no trouble adding the SIP credentials, configuring the NTP server, adding speed dials, and other various configuration options.

While referencing Tom's T-28P review for comparison to the T-38G, Tom has this noteworthy comment:

The web interface displays a message when the phone is registered so you know immediately if you put the SIP credentials in correctly. I have to say, I really loved how every change I made DOES NOT require a reboot.

As scary as it sounds – that iOS device which you thought was safe from hackers because Apple controls the App Store could get infected through a malicious charger. This is a major concern for IT departments who didn’t previously worry about Apple devices which were not jailbroken. It is now impossible to know which Apple devices have been infected meaning all of them are suspect.

An article on TMCnet by Steve Anderson explains that a group of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology discovered the exploit which can be duplicated via a device called a Mactans charger.

If you had a chance to listen to my radio interview with IMI TechTalk you know I believe the analytics behinds wearable computing will be a huge business. As sensors and cameras become part of our wardrobe, there will be billions of new data gathering devices connected to the cloud.

Companies like Facebook and Google will want to soak up as much of this data as possible and use it to generate revenue through a variety of services.

At a certain point, many of us will have sensors on our bodies - perhaps as part of our smarphones which measure our pulse and body temperature in real time. Using analytics we can use this data to determine the epicenter of a variety of incidents. For example, one imagines heart rates will increase in unison when there is roaring thunder, tsunami or earthquake.

Moreover, this data can be used to determine the spread of the flu or a pandemic based upon the increasing temperature of a population.

In addition there could be early heart attack symptoms we can determine from this wealth of sensory information which means lives can be saved...